Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 90.djvu/107

���The beautiful eggs
of the swallow-
tail butterfly as re-
vealed by the film

��Popular Science Monthly

screen, two eggs are shown, bombarded by millions
of spermatozoa. The fact that the fertilization
of an animal egg is fundamentally the same
process as that previously witnessed in the plant,
drives home the essential similarity of the
reproductive processes in the animal and
vegetable kingdom. In every case fertilization
consists in the fusion of two specially organized
cells. After fertilization, the cell resulting from
the union proceeds to divide into many cells,
which finally colonize into what is then an embr\o.

From Egg to Golden-Winged Butterfly

Full of dramatic interest is that section of the
film which depicts the life history of a butterfly —
one of the "swallow-tail" variety famous for the
yellow and black of its body and its "eye spots" of
red and blue. A mother swallow-tail is shown on
the screen laying her beautiful creamy-white eggs
on the sweet anise. Four days later — on the screen
only a minute later — a small black caterpillar
emerges from one of the eggs. It feeds. In order
to grow, it sheds its skin and emerges with a new
and more beautiful one. Another period of feeding
inter\-enes. Xow it is revealed spinning a silken
lopp and attaching itself to a firm support. Then
the mar\-elous process of skin-shedding is un-
folded. A chr\-salis has been formed. For many
months this hangs motionless. Then, as the film
unreels, it suddenly shows signs of life. At the
end of two days — a few seconds on the screen — it
bursts open and releases a limp, curious insect
with crumpled wings. This is the new butterfly.

So, other life processes are explained — those of
the frog, the chicken, the rat. When the last foot
of film has flickered past, you come away with the
feeling that man himself is mysteriously linked
with that simple protozoan which you saw in the
beginning, and that the process of growth and
development is the same in all the living universe.

��91

���A dramatic moment as the film unreels is that when
the butterfly struggles out of the chrysalis. It has
passed through many stages since the egg was laid,
but now its limp wings expand and it soars away

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��Portion of the film
showing the cater-
pillar stage of the
butterfly's life

���The butterfly flits
joyously away after
having emerged
from the chrysalis